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Casey Handmer's company is creating synthetic hydrocarbons from renewable energy. Here is a good video where he gives a tour of the company and talks about its

by aesch 2y ago

Casey Handmer's company is creating synthetic hydrocarbons from renewable energy. Here is a good video where he gives a tour of the company and talks about its goals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NngCHTImH1g. Curious what people think about the idea of synthetic hydrocarbons? It is a seemingly obvious idea that I hadn't heard about until recently, as long as you can use energy efficiently to create the synthetic hydrocarbons.

churchill 2y ago
Synthetic hydrocarbons will likely fail, simply because of the same reasons vertical farming failed. Once you're spending money on infrastructure to capture solar energy, losing 80% to inefficiency, before piping into your vertical farm via LEDs (losing another 50% to 80%), a farmer who draws free sunshine will outcompete you because he's using free energy while you're spending millions to power a small factory sized farm; energy isn't free. Likewise, Casey's idea (Terraform Industries) requires solar energy to convert air and water to natural gas. It'll cost 10x the price of the gas Qatar & Saudi Arabia pump out of the ground essentially for free. These technologies won't be viable until humanity is pressed harder and prices (for food or fuel) climb.
- schiffern 2y ago
  Inevitably the solution to the anti-profitability of running (essentially) a gas power plant in reverse is government subsidies. Amazing how otherwise "efficient market" folks can forget market wisdom the moment big change is needed in big industries. The touted advantage is that instead of market-driven electrification of multiple sectors you only need one big silver bullet technology, however these are futile systems that actually reduce the total amount of energy available to society (vs electrification which does the opposite). And since the pricing signals are messed up by subsidies you can't invest in the economically optimal amount of energy efficiency. This is precisely the opposite of the sort of activity we might want to subsidize. Handmer has some great writing on space subjects, but on this we're going to disagree.
- d_burfoot 2y ago
  The analogy to vertical farming is a tempting one, but ultimately misleading. There is a crucial difference between TI-produced natural gas and Saudi-produced gas: the former is carbon neutral, the latter isn't. For every molecule of CH4 TI creates, they're pulling a molecule of C02 out of the atmosphere to do it. When you burn a CH4 molecule from a Saudi well, you're moving carbon from the ground into the atmosphere.
  - schiffern 2y ago
    It makes no difference. Saudi Arabia won't stop pumping gas because it's not carbon neutral. edit Depleting their entire reserves of gas would be stopping because it's unsustainable, not because it's not carbon neutral. Also that sounds like a really bad idea.
    - sn9 2y ago
      Running out of gas in the ground will do that though.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - sl-1 2y ago
        Sadly there seems to be reserves[1] for quite a long time. The real question is how much of the reserves are profitable to exploit. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_gas_proven_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
      - XorNot 2y ago
        We will not run out for hundreds to thousands of years. We also can't afford to stop using it by "running out" since that implies we burned it all.
  - churchill 2y ago
    Will you pay 10x for synthetic fuel? And if you do, for moral reasons, you will be driven out of the market by those burning cheaper fuel. Just like the cultured meat startups have learned, established players won't let you take away their subsidies and drive them out of business. Big Oil has rivers of money to lobby and make sure carbon-neutral fuel startups can't legislate them out of the market.
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  You seem very confident in your position, and I am reminded of the confidence of people exclaiming solar power would never take off back when commercially available PV efficiencies were in the single digit percentages. Going from 8% to 24% effectively tripled PV panel output on a per area basis, even though it sounds like just a 16% increase. Given your confidence, I assume you are aware of efficiency bottlenecks and their associated fundamental thermodynamic limits. What do you believe is the bottleneck, and what thermodynamic principle limits it? At renewable farm scale everyone has read about negative pricing etc, so it seems there will always be a niche to profit from. How can you predict in advance the capex investment cost in advance of future developments? Pumping up fossil fuel certainly comes with costs (even when excluding moral and future costs), think of employees, securing facilities against attack, etc. Given Western divestment from Russian fossil fuels, on non-economic grounds, why couldn't we similarly some day divest from fossil fuels? > It'll cost 10x the price of the gas Qatar & Saudi Arabia pump out of the ground essentially for free. What a bizarre statement, 10x 0 = 0. If you want to educate people how you believe electroreduction of CO2 to be a dead end, please give scientific and economic evidence that renewable fuels could never become cheaper than sourcing and or distributing fossil fuels.
- Veserv 2y ago
  Their thesis is probably that solar electricity will soon be (as an example) 1/10th the price of natural gas electricity and that they believe they can get 10-30% storage/conversion efficiency. Therefore, the price of synthetic natural gas will be cheaper than current natural gas. There are a number of acknowledged assumptions in that model and other potential problems that may make their thesis incorrect, but you have raised none of them so far nor directly refuted the thesis.
  - caminante 2y ago
    No. Parent directly challenged the model because of thermodynamic loss and expense v. substitutes. E-fuels is contingent on subsidies, and you can't just wand away costs with a renewables price decline. These plants require firmed up renewables supply shape that a solar or wind farm can't provide alone. What's that mean? $$$ Another thing, most of the metal in these facilities doesn't have a price decline curve. The ramp to parity is long and level.
    - Veserv 2y ago
      First, they did not seem to make a thermodynamic loss argument. They made that argument for vertical farming versus regular farming to argue that the inputs to regular farming are cheaper because they are not harvesting solar energy with extra steps. That is a perfectly cogent argument because the inputs are the same in both cases. You can not make the same argument for solar energy versus drilling costs without making the reader fill in a ridiculous number of gaps in the argument. Even assuming they did obliquely try to make a thermodynamic loss argument, it is irrelevant. Thermodynamic efficiency is not really related to electricity costs except indirectly otherwise we would all be using ultra-expensive 30% efficiency solar panels instead of cheap as dirt 10-20% efficiency solar panels. It is a contributor, but the core question is price efficiency of the non-"drilled hydrocarbon" energy commodity. The thesis is that non-subsidized solar energy-derived electricity will be cheap enough relative to hydrocarbon synthesis efficiency that it will be cheaper to synthesize than drilling it out of the ground (at current prices). There are many ways to reject that thesis, of which you present at least a few, but the comment I was responding to did not bring them up. Given their other responses, they keep acting as if the thesis is: "We will make synthetic hydrocarbons that are 10x more expensive than harvested hydrocarbons, but we expect people to buy them anyways for reasons" which is obviously a strawman. The point of the discussion is entirely in whether it will be 10x more expensive, where one side claims it will be cost-competitive and the other side disagrees. To that end, here are some options including ones you brought up that at least provide potential counter-arguments for the actual point under contention: 1. Solar energy is actually non-viable, but subsidies make it, incorrectly, seem viable. 2. Solar energy will not continue to become cheaper exponentially and reach a low enough price. 3. Solar energy will become very cheap, but synthesis will be too cost-inefficient anyways. 4. Synthesis is cost-efficient on a per-unit basis, but requires capital intensive processes that only pay back if continuously active which solar can not provide. 5. Synthesis is only efficient at the margins right now. There is actually a lot of cheaply accessible hydrocarbons that can accept price reductions and still remain viable. All you will actually displace is a tiny edge of barely profitable hydrocarbons until there are even more significant cost reductions. 6. Solar energy cost reductions will also reduce hydrocarbon harvesting costs in a relative proportion that keeps harvesting viable. 7. They just suck at execution. 8. Something else.
- wrsh07 2y ago
  "will likely fail" is a surprising claim when it's not clear to me that vertical farming won't still have a chance to succeed For vertical farming, the question at the limit shouldn't be comparing solar and a farmer directly using sun, it should be: can we vertical farm on land that was unsuitable for farming? Is the cost of land increasing while the cost of solar decreases?
  - XorNot 2y ago
    The cost of land in the city for living on is increasing much faster then the cost of rural agrarian land. Which we absolutely should not destroy to try and build skyscraper vertical farms on.
Retric 2y ago
The problem with synthetic hydrocarbons isn’t energy abstractly its capital vs energy costs. The more hours per month of electricity you want the more you end up paying on a per kWh basis. So if you’re fine turning all the equipment off most the of time you can get really cheap power, but having a 1 billion dollar facility including its workforce doing nothing 70% of the time is expensive. On the flip side if you want 24/7 operation you end up with much higher per kWh rates.
- amelius 2y ago
  > having a 1 billion dollar facility including its workforce doing nothing 70% of the time is expensive We work normally only about 33% of a day.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Very expensive industrial facilities don't.
sien 2y ago
There are a few companies doing it. Prometheus Fuels is another, they have been on HN previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31264388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31264388 They have a cool website : https://prometheusfuels.com/ https://prometheusfuels.com/ There are some companies that want to use nuclear power , Valar Atomics is one : https://www.valaratomics.com/ https://www.valaratomics.com/ The cost estimates seem to be 4-10 times as expensive as fossil fuels.
- sn9 2y ago
  > The cost estimates seem to be 4-10 times as expensive as fossil fuels. Importantly, this cost is expected to decrease precipitously as the cost of solar energy declines exponentially and as the the conversion technology continues to improve through iteration and economies of scale.
  - sien 2y ago
    That's very true. Also, over the next century the cost of fossil fuel extraction will increase and the price of synthetic and fossil fuels will get much closer at least. If there was a tax reduction for carbon neutral fuels they could become cost competitive even more rapidly. Kerosene for aviation and diesel for ships, trucks and mining are good candidates for synthetic fuels.
wrsh07 2y ago
One of the most exciting things not really mentioned elsewhere in the thread (as far as I see!) is that you can make synthetic hydro carbons wherever you want. If you wanted to have a refueling airport in the middle of the ocean, you could put up a bunch of renewable energy generation (expensive!), use that energy to produce jet fuel (this handwaves a lot / might not be feasible as stated), sell jet fuel that you haven't had to transport Similarly, while our global logistics are incredible, some of the cost of oil etc is that we need good systems for transporting it (pipelines, ships). Instead, imagine producing it on location. Finally, my favorite model for new technologies (not really useful if you believe the Weinersmith "A city on Mars" thesis) is: will this technology be useful on Mars or the moon? Eg Hyperloop makes much more sense if you already are operating in a vacuum From that lens, I think technology like this is pretty useful to create.

by aesch 2y ago

churchill 2y ago

Synthetic hydrocarbons will likely fail, simply because of the same reasons vertical farming failed. Once you're spending money on infrastructure to capture solar energy, losing 80% to inefficiency, before piping into your vertical farm via LEDs (losing another 50% to 80%), a farmer who draws free sunshine will outcompete you because he's using free energy while you're spending millions to power a small factory sized farm; energy isn't free. Likewise, Casey's idea (Terraform Industries) requires solar energy to convert air and water to natural gas. It'll cost 10x the price of the gas Qatar & Saudi Arabia pump out of the ground essentially for free. These technologies won't be viable until humanity is pressed harder and prices (for food or fuel) climb.

schiffern 2y ago
Inevitably the solution to the anti-profitability of running (essentially) a gas power plant in reverse is government subsidies. Amazing how otherwise "efficient market" folks can forget market wisdom the moment big change is needed in big industries. The touted advantage is that instead of market-driven electrification of multiple sectors you only need one big silver bullet technology, however these are futile systems that actually reduce the total amount of energy available to society (vs electrification which does the opposite). And since the pricing signals are messed up by subsidies you can't invest in the economically optimal amount of energy efficiency. This is precisely the opposite of the sort of activity we might want to subsidize. Handmer has some great writing on space subjects, but on this we're going to disagree.
d_burfoot 2y ago
The analogy to vertical farming is a tempting one, but ultimately misleading. There is a crucial difference between TI-produced natural gas and Saudi-produced gas: the former is carbon neutral, the latter isn't. For every molecule of CH4 TI creates, they're pulling a molecule of C02 out of the atmosphere to do it. When you burn a CH4 molecule from a Saudi well, you're moving carbon from the ground into the atmosphere.
- schiffern 2y ago
  It makes no difference. Saudi Arabia won't stop pumping gas because it's not carbon neutral. edit Depleting their entire reserves of gas would be stopping because it's unsustainable, not because it's not carbon neutral. Also that sounds like a really bad idea.
  - sn9 2y ago
    Running out of gas in the ground will do that though.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - sl-1 2y ago
      Sadly there seems to be reserves[1] for quite a long time. The real question is how much of the reserves are profitable to exploit. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_gas_proven_reserves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
    - XorNot 2y ago
      We will not run out for hundreds to thousands of years. We also can't afford to stop using it by "running out" since that implies we burned it all.
- churchill 2y ago
  Will you pay 10x for synthetic fuel? And if you do, for moral reasons, you will be driven out of the market by those burning cheaper fuel. Just like the cultured meat startups have learned, established players won't let you take away their subsidies and drive them out of business. Big Oil has rivers of money to lobby and make sure carbon-neutral fuel startups can't legislate them out of the market.
DoctorOetker 2y ago
You seem very confident in your position, and I am reminded of the confidence of people exclaiming solar power would never take off back when commercially available PV efficiencies were in the single digit percentages. Going from 8% to 24% effectively tripled PV panel output on a per area basis, even though it sounds like just a 16% increase. Given your confidence, I assume you are aware of efficiency bottlenecks and their associated fundamental thermodynamic limits. What do you believe is the bottleneck, and what thermodynamic principle limits it? At renewable farm scale everyone has read about negative pricing etc, so it seems there will always be a niche to profit from. How can you predict in advance the capex investment cost in advance of future developments? Pumping up fossil fuel certainly comes with costs (even when excluding moral and future costs), think of employees, securing facilities against attack, etc. Given Western divestment from Russian fossil fuels, on non-economic grounds, why couldn't we similarly some day divest from fossil fuels? > It'll cost 10x the price of the gas Qatar & Saudi Arabia pump out of the ground essentially for free. What a bizarre statement, 10x 0 = 0. If you want to educate people how you believe electroreduction of CO2 to be a dead end, please give scientific and economic evidence that renewable fuels could never become cheaper than sourcing and or distributing fossil fuels.
Veserv 2y ago
Their thesis is probably that solar electricity will soon be (as an example) 1/10th the price of natural gas electricity and that they believe they can get 10-30% storage/conversion efficiency. Therefore, the price of synthetic natural gas will be cheaper than current natural gas. There are a number of acknowledged assumptions in that model and other potential problems that may make their thesis incorrect, but you have raised none of them so far nor directly refuted the thesis.
- caminante 2y ago
  No. Parent directly challenged the model because of thermodynamic loss and expense v. substitutes. E-fuels is contingent on subsidies, and you can't just wand away costs with a renewables price decline. These plants require firmed up renewables supply shape that a solar or wind farm can't provide alone. What's that mean? $$$ Another thing, most of the metal in these facilities doesn't have a price decline curve. The ramp to parity is long and level.
  - Veserv 2y ago
    First, they did not seem to make a thermodynamic loss argument. They made that argument for vertical farming versus regular farming to argue that the inputs to regular farming are cheaper because they are not harvesting solar energy with extra steps. That is a perfectly cogent argument because the inputs are the same in both cases. You can not make the same argument for solar energy versus drilling costs without making the reader fill in a ridiculous number of gaps in the argument. Even assuming they did obliquely try to make a thermodynamic loss argument, it is irrelevant. Thermodynamic efficiency is not really related to electricity costs except indirectly otherwise we would all be using ultra-expensive 30% efficiency solar panels instead of cheap as dirt 10-20% efficiency solar panels. It is a contributor, but the core question is price efficiency of the non-"drilled hydrocarbon" energy commodity. The thesis is that non-subsidized solar energy-derived electricity will be cheap enough relative to hydrocarbon synthesis efficiency that it will be cheaper to synthesize than drilling it out of the ground (at current prices). There are many ways to reject that thesis, of which you present at least a few, but the comment I was responding to did not bring them up. Given their other responses, they keep acting as if the thesis is: "We will make synthetic hydrocarbons that are 10x more expensive than harvested hydrocarbons, but we expect people to buy them anyways for reasons" which is obviously a strawman. The point of the discussion is entirely in whether it will be 10x more expensive, where one side claims it will be cost-competitive and the other side disagrees. To that end, here are some options including ones you brought up that at least provide potential counter-arguments for the actual point under contention: 1. Solar energy is actually non-viable, but subsidies make it, incorrectly, seem viable. 2. Solar energy will not continue to become cheaper exponentially and reach a low enough price. 3. Solar energy will become very cheap, but synthesis will be too cost-inefficient anyways. 4. Synthesis is cost-efficient on a per-unit basis, but requires capital intensive processes that only pay back if continuously active which solar can not provide. 5. Synthesis is only efficient at the margins right now. There is actually a lot of cheaply accessible hydrocarbons that can accept price reductions and still remain viable. All you will actually displace is a tiny edge of barely profitable hydrocarbons until there are even more significant cost reductions. 6. Solar energy cost reductions will also reduce hydrocarbon harvesting costs in a relative proportion that keeps harvesting viable. 7. They just suck at execution. 8. Something else.
wrsh07 2y ago
"will likely fail" is a surprising claim when it's not clear to me that vertical farming won't still have a chance to succeed For vertical farming, the question at the limit shouldn't be comparing solar and a farmer directly using sun, it should be: can we vertical farm on land that was unsuitable for farming? Is the cost of land increasing while the cost of solar decreases?
- XorNot 2y ago
  The cost of land in the city for living on is increasing much faster then the cost of rural agrarian land. Which we absolutely should not destroy to try and build skyscraper vertical farms on.

Retric 2y ago

The problem with synthetic hydrocarbons isn’t energy abstractly its capital vs energy costs. The more hours per month of electricity you want the more you end up paying on a per kWh basis. So if you’re fine turning all the equipment off most the of time you can get really cheap power, but having a 1 billion dollar facility including its workforce doing nothing 70% of the time is expensive. On the flip side if you want 24/7 operation you end up with much higher per kWh rates.

amelius 2y ago
> having a 1 billion dollar facility including its workforce doing nothing 70% of the time is expensive We work normally only about 33% of a day.
- immibis 2y ago
  Very expensive industrial facilities don't.

sien 2y ago

There are a few companies doing it. Prometheus Fuels is another, they have been on HN previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31264388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31264388 They have a cool website : https://prometheusfuels.com/ https://prometheusfuels.com/ There are some companies that want to use nuclear power , Valar Atomics is one : https://www.valaratomics.com/ https://www.valaratomics.com/ The cost estimates seem to be 4-10 times as expensive as fossil fuels.

sn9 2y ago
> The cost estimates seem to be 4-10 times as expensive as fossil fuels. Importantly, this cost is expected to decrease precipitously as the cost of solar energy declines exponentially and as the the conversion technology continues to improve through iteration and economies of scale.
- sien 2y ago
  That's very true. Also, over the next century the cost of fossil fuel extraction will increase and the price of synthetic and fossil fuels will get much closer at least. If there was a tax reduction for carbon neutral fuels they could become cost competitive even more rapidly. Kerosene for aviation and diesel for ships, trucks and mining are good candidates for synthetic fuels.

wrsh07 2y ago

One of the most exciting things not really mentioned elsewhere in the thread (as far as I see!) is that you can make synthetic hydro carbons wherever you want. If you wanted to have a refueling airport in the middle of the ocean, you could put up a bunch of renewable energy generation (expensive!), use that energy to produce jet fuel (this handwaves a lot / might not be feasible as stated), sell jet fuel that you haven't had to transport Similarly, while our global logistics are incredible, some of the cost of oil etc is that we need good systems for transporting it (pipelines, ships). Instead, imagine producing it on location. Finally, my favorite model for new technologies (not really useful if you believe the Weinersmith "A city on Mars" thesis) is: will this technology be useful on Mars or the moon? Eg Hyperloop makes much more sense if you already are operating in a vacuum From that lens, I think technology like this is pretty useful to create.